EVERY four years a new batch of campaign promises to cut government spending and rid the land of federal bureaucratic red tape, mismanagement, and fraud bubble up and cover the nation in a sea of righteous froth, often just hot, soapy air but occasionally bringing forth such tangible changes as the current Proposition 2 1/2.

Government waste and fraud has long fueled campaign rhetoric, and this year's elections were no different. Ronald Reagan and a conservative Senate swept in on the tide of his anti-inflation platform, denouncing the increased deficit spending, congested policy making and great waste of the Carter administration, just as Carter rode four years ago on the tide of Watergate and anti-big-business sentiment directed against the Republicans in office.

Regardless of party affiliation or prominence, government waste and fraud is constantly in the public eye, hounded and exposed by a well armed array of waste-watchers from Ralph Nader to Jack Anderson to vindictive congressional committees. The public sector is available and accountable to a scruitinizing, sensitive, cost-conscious public. But what of the red tape and bureaucratic mismanagement in the private sector, as rampant if less detectable than public fraud? Who blows the whistle on individual, private rip-offs of the unwary customer?

Unfortunately, policing fraud and waste in the private sector lags far behind its more accessible public cousin, and the many inroads into it today just attack the tip of the iceberg. It is a rare occurence when private companies or corporations are hauled into court. Exceptions like Lockheed and AT&T of several years back cheer the little consumer but remain rarities.

And, contrary to popular delusion, the sheltered, self-contained oasis that is Harvard does not exempt its students from the occasional rip-off. Not simply as consumers, but as employees and burgeoning members of the working world, students are potential victims of private fraud and slow death-by-red-tape. Summer employment perhaps enerates the most calamities of all. A classic (and actual) case of summer employment rip-off involved a Harvard student this summer. One student pursued an ad in OCS-OCL's summer jobs file for a head-tennis-pro position, financed her own trip to Washington D.C. to try out for the job at a "placement" agency, was given the job, left the required $50 deposit, and waited happily for June to begin work. The placement agency had no one with any knowledge of tennis skills or playing experience; the plot was revealed when they hired four students on an adjacent court with sub-intramural tennis abilities, and ran a strictly profit-making business, stuffing bodies indiscriminately into contracted positions and avoiding the consequences by shifting all responsibility on the new hiree.

After discovering that her new "head-tennis-pro" position was in fact a glorified 24-hour a day bratsitting purgatory, the student endured two weeks of the aggravating job. Suffering with inexperienced tennis staff and repeated discouragements from using discipline on her renegade wards, she sought means to recover her initial outlay for the job, and the two-weeks earned pay. The scenario went something like this:

Student: "Excuse me, but I have not been paid for my two-weeks of work yet nor reimbursed for travel, interview, and deposit expenses. When can you pay me?"

Washington Tennis Service (WTS): "Sorry, you'll have to contact your employer. After all, he was the one you worked for and should therefore be the one to pay you."

Employer: "Your contract is with WTS, not us, so they are responsible for paying you. They haven't paid us anything, so we have nothing to pay you with."

Student: "Listen, WTS, my contract is with you. My employer is unable to pay me; therefore, you must pay me.

WTS: "We have no written record of your contract. You never sent a copy of it back to our files, so we're under no legal obligation to pay you."

Student: "but I never even received a contract from you."

WTS: "That is because you left early. It would have come eventually."

Student: "Then who is going to reimburse me?"

WTS: "That's your problem, not ours."